Video transcript

BETH HARRIS: We're
in Tate Britain, and we're looking at
John Everett Millais' really important early
pre-Raphaelite painting, "Christ in the House
of his Parents. STEVEN ZUCKER: The
pre-Raphaelites wanted to strip away all of
the traditions of painting that had accumulated, almost
like heavy layers of varnish, on paintings since the
Renaissance, since Raphael. And nowhere is that more
clearer than in this painting. BETH HARRIS: So what we see
here is Christ as a child. He's wounded himself. We see a drop of blood, clearly
foreshadowing the crucifixion. And we see Mary, his
mother, comforting him, and also, I think,
being comforted by him. And then we also see
Saint John the Baptist, and also Joseph, who's
also tending to Christ. STEVEN ZUCKER: He's
showing us Christ not in an idealized
environment, But in a workshop that reminded contemporary
viewers of what a carpenter's workshop in
mid-19th century England looked like, a kind
of specificity that showed that he was
really looking. BETH HARRIS: So it's
not idealized at all. It's not softened, it's
not made more beautiful. And all of that really went
against traditional treatments of the holy family, of Mary,
and Christ, and Saint Joseph, and Saint John. Since the time of
Raphael and Leonardo, those figures were truly
idealized in a way that reflected their divine status. So by taking that
idealization away, I think it felt, to
Victorian viewers, as though Millais had
undermined the spirituality of these figures. STEVEN ZUCKER: All
of that is true, but there are some exceptions. If we think back to the work,
for instance, of Caravaggio, you have an artist is
taking spiritual figures and placing them in a
world, that was concrete, that was low, that was real. But he was still
ensconcing them in a kind of spiritual darkness. And here it's as if Millais
has turned the lights on in a Caravaggio. And he's giving us this
brilliant spotlight on the specificity, even of
the dirt under the fingernails. BETH HARRIS: And
that was certainly something that was recognized
by Victorian viewers. This painting was attacked
by Charles Dickens, of all people, who
wrote, "In the foreground of that very carpenter's
shop is a hideous rye-necked, blubbering, redheaded
boy in a bed gown, who appears to have received
a poke in the hand from the stick of another boy
with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter. And to be holding it up
for the contemplation of a kneeling women, so
horrible in her ugliness, that she would stand
out from the rest of the company as a monster in
the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin
shop in England." STEVEN ZUCKER:
It's so interesting to hear Dickens actually turn
against the kind of specificity that the artist is
rendering, since it's so much a part of
his own literature. But it does speak
to expectations in the 19th century about what
art should be, at this moment when the pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood was trying to remake those expectations. BETH HARRIS: And so if you
look at the painting carefully, you can see that the
figures have an angularity. They move in ways that feel very
different from the gracefulness and elegance of
Renaissance figures. There's a linear
hardness to the way that Millais has
created their contours. STEVEN ZUCKER: And that hardness
reminds us of Flemish painting from before Rafael from,
say, the early 15th century. It is really the self-conscious
reviving of those ideas. And just like in that
northern Flemish painting, we also have
borrowed this notion that one can imbue ordinary
objects with symbolism. And this is a painting
that is full of symbolism. For instance, if we look just
over the young Christ's head, we can see on the back wall,
there's a carpenter's triangle. Just over Christ's head, that
triangle means something. It means the Trinity. BETH HARRIS: And we
might look at the ladder in the background, and
think about the ladder that we see in images of
the descent from the cross, where the followers of
Christ climb a ladder, in order to remove the nails and
bring him down from the cross. STEVEN ZUCKER: We
can see those nails, but also, on that
ladder, there's a dove, the reference to the ultimate
baptism of Christ, where the Holy Spirit will
appear, who's always was represented as a dove. BETH HARRIS: And we see Saint
John the Baptist actually on the right, carrying
a bowl of water. STEVEN ZUCKER: So
there is this kind of vivid rendering of all
these forms, all these people, with the kind of particularity
that is not idealized, that makes them all the more
true, all the more vivid. And so we can
immediately imagine why the Victorians had such
problems with this painting. [MUSIC PLAYING]